So, what are we doing?

Since we’ve decided to go forward with this project, we’ve been working like madmen, that’s what!

We’re currently in a design stage. This means that we’re currently working on game design and concept art, besides getting the technology on the point that we can use it to make this game.

There’s several different vectors in the game design work we’ve been doing, that complement each other:

• Lore: This is the definition of the world in which the game takes place, and the story of the game itself. Lore describes the history of the world and its denizens: gods, creatures, demons, the nature of magic, rise and fall of civilizations, etc. It provides us with the background necessary to create a cohesive world in terms of gameplay, even if most of the work there won’t be readily visible in the game (except by its consequences, of course). This has relatively low priority compared to the other game design tasks, since its not very concrete in terms of the game. Lots of things that are already part of the lore (needed to justify some game design and art concept choices) aren’t even written, and most are still very mutable according to our needs.
• Main storyline: This is one of the selling points of the game (I hope). The main story arc (a series of stories that make up a larger story) is already defined in broad terms, with the key events laid out, but the main storyline for episode 1 is still being written. Although we have the discrete important events designed already (the bosses, the rewards, what led to the confrontation), the writing itself is still missing (dialogues, voice overs, etc). This means that we already have a general layout for the locations in episode 1, but we’re still need to fill up the locations to really flesh them out.
• Side-quests: At the moment, this is only a collection of ideas; locations like “the haunted lighthouse”, or “the caverns below Calabeth”; characters like “the betrayed lover”; items like “the cursed book”; battle mechanics like “teleporting skeleton magi”. We need to work on this to create more coherent stories that Grey will have to explore to get some bonuses (like experience, creatures, etc). This will allow us to flesh out the locations a bit more, since they become more than just transition areas for monster bashing.
• In-game books: This will be the main source of background information in the game, and as such we need to write these “book excerpts” that will reveal more about the game world. I’ve not even started on this!
• Game mechanics: We’re designing a RPG, which means that I have to develop an entire battle system, and that means going over the mathematics of combat, besides “what feels fun”, while trying to steer clear of the main RPG influences (don’t want to rip off anything). I could try to get an “open-source” RPG system and adapt it to my needs, but that wouldn’t be so much fun!

All of this information is being written in our own internal-use wiki, so that we have everything cross-referenced and easy to access. Organizing information for everyone on the team (even a team as small as this) is a challenge, specially since changes must be easy to track (still working on this).

This wiki is mainly accessed by Rincewind, which turns the material into concepts.

He’s been mainly working on creature design, and he just recently started working on the architectural design…

We’re trying to create a distinct identity to Calabeth (the ruined city where the first episode takes place) from an architecture standpoint. Currently he’s doing experiments crossing arabic and germanic architecture.

On the creature design front, there were a lot of discussions about on how to build the art assets: should we use mount points for pieces of armor for the skeletons, or just create a specific model for each of the skeleton types? How do we create variety in monsters without too much work being put on the shoulders of our only designer? How do we make the pockets of poison in the Unstable Zombie, do we use bone scaling or just a pulsing emissive channel?

This has direct impact in the technology and as such should be discussed early. For example, we decided that it would be useful to add some level of material animation to the objects (which the engine already supports, of course), but we want that material animation to be viewable on the editor, which means that I have to add authoring tools on the SurgeEd for that… but we have to see if that will be used in more than on the the Unstable Zombie to make it worth our while to develop a system that will take about a week developing… This is the kind of decisions we keep running into.

On the technology front, we’re working mainly on the editor and in the editor/player integration. Although the editor is already a very powerful piece of software, it still misses some features that will make it more useful… For example, my last 4 or 5 hours of programming were spent getting object scaling integrated with the engine/editor, with correct collision detection… Next steps include creating the concept of a geo-cluster, which is a single object that aggregates the static objects that share some properties. We need geo-clusters for optimizing render calls (the main geo clusters), optimize shadowmap rendering (shadow clusters) and collision detection (collision clusters).

This in turn will be necessary to add the first piece of gameplay-related technology (until now, it’s all rendering-related): the navigation mesh that will support movement within an area.

The main goal at the moment, from the technology front is to get a prototype ready as fast as possible, so we can start playing around with the different concepts of the game, to find out exactly what is “fun” and what is “boring”, what level of micro/macro management is interesting, and which of these just seems like another job…

Most of us are currently out of the country for the company retreat (on our real jobs) for a couple of days, so I don’t expect much new stuff to get done in the next days, but keep coming to the blog for more information on the development of Grey!